This postcard from the Harvey Ginsberg Postcard Collection shows the residence of Elizabeth Hill Dawson Gallatin, designed by the architect James H. L’Hommedieu for her husband, James Gallatin (1846-1890), a grandson of Albert Gallatin (1761-1849), the treasury secretary under Thomas Jefferson. The home was constructed in 1889 and remains on Ocean Avenue, a neighbor to another of L’Hommedieu’s designs, the Robert S. Bowne house.
Gallatin’s New York Times obituary noted that his lifelong ill health kept him from “enter[ing] college or engag[ing] in active business,” but he clearly shared with his professor brother, Albert H. Gallatin (1839-1902), an interest in science. He “devoted much time to the study of mechanics and electricity, and patented several inventions.” He even built his own organ.
The East Hampton Star reported that Gallatin added a laboratory to his house on Ocean Avenue on Aug. 2, 1890. Barely six weeks later, on Sept. 17, he died of heart disease.
Gallatin was widely documented as a progressive reformer who was deeply committed to improving tenement housing safety in New York City. He was president of the New York Sanitary Reform Society, and The Times concluded that “the crowning effort of his life was drawing up and securing the
passage of the Tenement House Reform bill of 1879,” which sought to make sanitary plumbing in tenement houses a necessity and require proper ventilation, air, and light for residents.
This postcard’s label identifies Gallatin’s widow as the owner of the home, dating the postcard to sometime after his death. Elizabeth, his widow, continued to summer with her children in the house on Ocean Avenue, which she called “The Rainbow,” through 1927, when she fell there. She struggled with lingering health issues from the accident before she died in New York in January 1928 at the age of 84.
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Andrea Meyer, a librarian and archivist, is the Long Island Collection’s head of collection.
